Boys Don’t Cry

Blackman was born in London, England, to Barbadian immigrants. As a kid, she wanted to be an English teacher, but she initially attended college to become a systems programmer instead. She later graduated from the National Film and Television School. Since starting to publish in 1990, Blackman has published a number of novels for adults and children, short stories, picture books, and early chapter books. She has also written for film, radio, and the stage. In terms of her novels, Blackman is best known for the Noughts & Crosses series, which consists of six novels and three companion novellas. The first in the series, Noughts & Crosses, was voted number 61 on BBC’s 2003 “Big Read” list, ranking ahead of Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities and some of Terry Pratchett’s novels. She also made history by being the first Black person to ever work on the television show Doctor Who. She received an OBE in 2008 for her contributions to literature, and from 2013 to 2015, she was named the Waterstones Children’s Laureate (a position recognizing outstanding children’s authors or illustrators). She lives with her husband and daughter in Kent, England.

Teen pregnancy rates in the United Kingdom are some of the highest in the developed world, at about 26 births per 1,000 women and girls under age 20. They also tend to be concentrated in areas where families are poorer, and where test scores tend to be low. As the novel notes, there are far fewer single-parent families led by fathers than by mothers—UK aid organizations estimate that dads make up between 10 and 15% of single-parent families in the country. Another issue the novel touches on is that of violence against LGBTQ people, and LGBTQ rights more generally. Violence against LGBTQ people continues to be a problem in the UK, and at the time Boys Don’t Cry was written in the late aughts, gay marriage wasn’t legal (it became legal in 2014). However, gay couples were still able to adopt children prior to this, as the government removed the stipulation that couples applying to adopt needed to be married in 2005.

Numerous contemporary novels explore the struggles that teen parents face, particularly teen dads. Angie Thomas’s Concrete Rose follows a young Black teen in the United States as he’s put in a similar situation to Dante, while Nick Hornby’s Slam follows its teenage protagonist from the moment his girlfriend discovers she’s pregnant. With the Fire on High by Elizabeth Acevedo, meanwhile, focuses on a teenage mother and her struggle to balance parenthood with her education. Racism and teen pregnancy are also pressing concerns in Blackman’s Noughts and Crosses series, which takes place in an alternate reality in which Africa colonized the rest of the world, resulting in widespread and violent racism against white people. The interracial couple’s illicit romance and unplanned pregnancy creates numerous problems for the protagonists. However, in the way that Blackman portrays Dante and his family’s race as just a fact of life and not his defining characteristic or a problem (though Dante and Adam do both suffer racist abuse from Josh), Boys Don’t Cry shares similarities with other novels like Jason Reynolds’s Look Both Ways and Nnedi Okorafor’s Akata Witch.